Science as Substrate: Mapping the Maturity of Research Supporting Innovate UK’s Innovation Portfolio

When should innovation agencies support new products and services? This is a persistent strategic dilemma. Intervening early, while the underlying scientific knowledge base is still forming, can secure first-mover advantages and a national stake in emergent domains, but risks supporting innovations that are premature. On the other hand, supporting innovations built upon more established knowledge lowers risk, but may sink resources into companies late to market.

As the UK’s national innovation agency, Innovate UK supports business-led innovations to start and grow, including those which have emerged from scientific research. Innovations do not emerge in a vacuum, but build in part upon the cumulative body of scientific knowledge. By measuring the maturity of this evidence base, our research uncovers strategic investment choices that Innovate UK has made over the past decades.

Using an enhanced version of UK Research and Innovation’s “Gateway to Research” funding data (GtR+), this report links 29,262 Innovate UK-funded projects to the global scientific literature across an underpinning corpus of over 40 million articles. An AI-assisted pipeline assigned each project a research topic, and topics were categorised as niche, emerging, active and mature based on publication volumes and growth rates. Weighting these categories by Innovate UK grant spend, we can establish where public funding for innovation sits relative to the developmental stage of the underlying science.

Key findings reveal that Innovate UK’s portfolio is underpinned by research spanning the full spectrum of scientific maturity, and that funding strategies shifted over time. We also present maturity profiles for the six frontier technologies prioritised in current UK government industrial strategy. Our experience using GtR+ reveals the value of enriched project-level data, but that data enhancements must be systematised within existing practice to optimise future funding strategy. This research provides the foundations for a novel diagnostic tool to evaluate strategic portfolio alignment, understand the historical role of public capital across the scientific lifecycle, and to identify unexploited translation gaps in the research landscape.

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